Monday, August 18, 2008

Sokal Hoax and friendly Simon Blackburn

I found this to be a very thoughtful and even handed review by Simon Blackburn of Alan Sokal's latest book, Beyond the Hoax. Sokal mercilessly mocked a generation of postmodern scholars... and as anyone who's read in that area knows, some of the criticism is deserved. But not all. Blackburn does a very good job of explaining the awkward position that editors are in when facing an interdiscplinary article... and more importantly, a scientific article in a humanities discipline. So many philosophers, literary theorists, and even poets, as I noticed during the last series of WW lectures I attended, want to "interpret" or make use of the latest (or even, just the last 75 years) of developments in biology and physics. But... they just do get it. Well, they get *some* of it or they get the part the publishing scientist has put into words; but the humanities readers are not privy to the data or the technical pieces of the articles, and so they can't critique the foundations of radical claims about, for example, cognition or the relation of time and space. The Sokal hoax is not just an incident of a smart physicist showing up some poorly-educated lit crit-ers, but evidence of the difficulties communicating between the sciences and the humanities in general. Thanks, Blackburn for affirming that.

Tragedy, Logos, Mythos and Louise Gluck's "Lament"

Louise Gluck the prepares the readers of her book, Ararat, to read arguments. She perhaps wishes she didn't have to write so many arguments or respond to them, asking in the opening poem, "Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?" But the trouble is, she was "Born to a vocatoin / to bear witness / to the great mysteries" and she has realized that " these / are proofs, not / mysteries --." On that em dash, we enter the book, to read her proofs or... her readings of the proofs in nature. Throughout the book, Gluck is wishing for wholes, for neat, complete forms like circles; this "love of form is a love of endings." She wants things to be complete, including her arguments. She wants to start telling you about some problem, some situation, caused by nature -- her birth, for example -- and to complete the proposition with a definitive conclusion. But, nature resists endings. And our own nature, more than any other part of nature, resists being judged completely.

In "Lament," Gluck takes a look at her own nature. That is, she takes a look at her whole life, as it will be viewed after death. Or, more precisely, she attempts to take a look at that whole. She tells the reader firmly in the opening sentence that "Suddenly, after you die, those friends / who never agreed about anything / agree about your character." READ MORE... She says, definitively, This is how it will be when you die: everything will be visible and everyone agreed. The mourners will be "like a houseful of singers rehearsing / the same score." They will be the chorus, able finally at the end of your life, to pass judgment. They will be able to decide finally that "you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life." As Aristotle tells us in his Ethics, we cannot know things things until after a life is complete: the goodness of a person's life depends on how it finishes, on the fortunes of his or her family, on the change that person's fortune after life. The goodness of a life is not visible to the one living that life or even to those living that life with her.

Of course, those who gather at Gluck's speaker's funeral are not just a chorus, "they're not performers; / real tears are shed." And, "[l]uckily, you're dead," says Gluck because otherwise this excessive display would overcome you with revulsion. And yet... at the same time, when all the mourners have settle down, have gone over your life, have had the coffee at the reception, you might, in the end, envy these people. They are, after all, alive and you, says the speaker, are dead (that is the premise of the poem). Meanwhile, "Your friends the living embrace one another / gossip a little." And you see that, counter to Aristotle, "this, this, is the meaning of / "a fortunate life": it means / to exist in the present."

To exist in the present. This is something you are not permitted after death. It's something quite hard to accomplish even while you're alive. This is the aim of much yogic philosophy: to be fully present. Yogis struggle for many years, not to struggle with life's projects. But... is that an inhuman aim? Heidegger would think so: to live authentically, is to live in the face of one'death. That is, to live toward and in light of, one's future, not to understand existence only in terms of presence. In Gluck's model,in contrast to Aristotle, fortune is indeterminant. Neither the first nor the third person perspective reveals fortune. The mourner judging a person like a chorus after the person's death can decide the quality of life; the person living a life can never know if she fully exists in the present.

Gluck opens the poem with a hypothesis, considers one traditional response (Aristotle's), then exposes details through phenomenological research (i.e. looking at the lived experience of the situation) and finally concludes with her own assessment. The poem presents an argument, a proof. But we can't understand this proof as simply fuzzy "poet's logic." Gluck is really making a counter argument. To the logos, the account, of Aristotle, she presents another account, another logos. The logos makes use of a bit of mythos (On this distinction, see John Sallis, Being and Logos). But the conclusion we reach at the end, was hard won through this account, not just lightly presented.

Gluck changes the nature of tragedy, even while playing on the classical Greek mode. We cannot witness the lives of others and, through pity and fear, excise emotions in order to learn and live a good live, together as a health polis. There are not good actions or bad actions or fated actions that can dame or redeem us. No, no. The tragedy is that we can only learn, looking on the lives of others, that it is good to be alive, that all there is, is to be present to that life, whatever its quality.

And of course... by imagining her own death, by asking us to imagine ours, Gluck pulls herself and her readers away from the very present she has exhorted us to appreciate. Ironically, only through the lesson learned by looking away from the present -- toward death -- are we reminded to attend to the present.

Now, I'm reading Gluck's "Lament" because I also like to make "arguments" in my poems. I can help it! I read arguments all day. Of course, as a good philosopher trained in the 'continental' / hermeneutic tradition, I am also always asking myself what an argument is in the first place, how it differs from a story, and what the nature of language is that it permits us (if it does) to distinguish those categories, arguments and stories. As a philosopher, writing poetry, I am often worried about making "fuzzy" arguments: the sorts of poetic "arguments" that skip a few step, that enjoy the ad hominem, that don't care about objections. And... of course, as a poet, that I will be ruining my poems with too many arguments! Even Plato tells us in the Phaedo, that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must tell stories, not arguments. But... Gluck is certainly making a sort of argument here. And she's certainly a poet. So I must conclude that either Plato was wrong, (he was badly translated), he means something different by "story" than I do, that he didn't mean the categories as exclusive (you could have stories and arguments), or that poetry has just generally become something different than it was for Plato. I usually resist the last argument as an easy out that assumes a too-flexible view of the human condition. But the other options still leave too much room for a full conclusion.

So... let's abandon that tactic and Plato altogether, and just say that if Gluck can do it, then it's possible. Arguments *in* poems. But... the way to do it, is by way of a story. This poem would most likely fail were it not to include the rhetorical exercise of imagining your own death and the image of the mourners living through the funeral. So... the lesson is, A little of both? Well, that's a recipe that could use a few more details and it certainly won't help me write a poem. But Gluck's work affirms the possibility of this combination. And... outside of its crafty tools and rhetoric, I appreciate the content of the argument she's made. Be present. That's pretty straight forward. Isn't it?

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Why "me"???

I was assigned to read “Andrea del Sarto,” because in Shapiro’s words, “there’s nothing but character” in this poem. But whose character? There are at least two important characters in the poem, represented directly and indirectly: the speaker and the addressee of the monologue. Both characters concern me: what are their characteristics and how does Browning manage to convey these qualities? The poem fits into steady blank verse, with some unobtrusive internal rhyme. These formal structures recede to foreground the quality of the speaker’s voice and thought.
The speaker is a painter, apparently the painter of the title, Andrea del Sarto. By his own account, he is a good painter and well-established. He does “no sketches first, no studies” before he paints; the many would-be artists around him struggle to accomplish what he easily dashes off: he does “what many dream of all their lives.” And yet, he does not relish his success or even find it honest. He thinks that those other, struggling artists “reach many a time a heaven” that is closed to him, even if his work itself is heavenly. But heaven is not something we can really reach anyway, del Sarto thinks. Heaven is an ideal, an aim, but unattainable: “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”
It’s hard for del Sarto to tell the difference between himself and his art.
READ MORE... During the autumn evening that frames the poem, del Sarto sees “alike my work and self.” And he sees that God controls all of this – the evening, the couple watching it, the art, the selves. But this deceptive God only gives the inhabitants of his world the appearance of freedom. They seem free, but God has fettered them. Del Sarto plays on the phrase, “to lead a life,” exclaiming that it is strange to look at “the life He makes us lead!” (my emphasis) God gives people the impression that they are in control, they are guiding their lives, but they are only walking ahead of him, attached by a chain he put on at birth. Like a perverse psychologist, God lets the speaker talk and talk, permitting him the impression that he controls the conversation. But a secret agenda and hidden rules and knowledge decide the situation and the very soul of the speaker.
Lucrezia, the character who is the addressee of the monologue and present at the speech, says nothing about del Sarto’s musing. She does not seem to think much about his work… or to think much at all, according to del Sarto. He tells her, “you don’t understand / Nor care to understand about my art.” She has smeared one of his paintings, “carelessly passing with … [her] robes afloat.” And the premise of the poem is that she’s asked him to paint something for a friend of a friend, to get a little money. After he promises to do so, he has to persuade her just to sit with him for the evening. She’ll also be his model for the promised paintings, so they’d better keep on good terms, even if the relationship is a bit unbalanced. Del Sarto wishes that with her pretty model’s face she had “but brought a mind!” He pithily remakes that “some women do so.” Not only that, he wishes that rather than asking him to pander his art for money, she’d said “God and the glory! Never care for gain.” But… these are only idle wishes in del Sarto’s mind; he’s not going to leave her and look for a more artistic, passionate partner. “God over-rules” everything and his fate is his fate. More to the point, “incentives come from the soul’s self; the rest avail not”: that is to say, del Sarto thinks his situation is his own fault. He has opportunities to rise through some great patrons, but he stuck with his Lucrezia. He admits that as a result, he might be a bit “underrated.” Musing on that, he dares to “fix” an arm in a painting by Raphael (or copied from a Raphael) that sits in his studio. Without glory, without praise from Raphael and Michaelangelo, the only criterion of assessment del Sarto has is money. If Lucrezia would consent to sit with him more often, he says he would work better, where “better” is equivalent to having more money: “I should work better, do you comprehend? I mean that I should earn more, give you more.” Despite all this – all his doubts about himself, his relationship – he concludes that “God is just.” He says – with purported resolve – “I regret little, I would change less still,” though only a few lines later, admitting that he let his parents die in poverty. After his long diatribe, all that Lucrezia does is get up to go out with her Cousin without del Sarto. Still, del Sarto finds ironically that in fact she loved him “quite enough … to-night.” Perhaps he’s had quite enough of her sort of love. In any case, he doesn’t stop her from going out.
I learn, through del Sarto, some details about Lucrezia’s responses to his work and via these details, something of del Sarto’s thoughts about himself. But always, always, the question in the back of my mind is, what does I learn of Robert Browning by reading this poem? Nothing? Enough? Should I learn something? Commentary on Browning takes up a substantial chunk of a stack in the university library. With all his masks of characters and dissociative relations between himself and his speakers, he’s a subject just begging for post-modern sort of commentary (and there is plenty). One comment I found helpful as a quick summary sort of position is that Browning “never thought of utterance as performed outside history in a Shelleyan lyric space” but that does mean that he was just trapped in “neurotic self-concealment behind his speakers.” Rather, Browning simply accepted that “consciousness, when properly conceived [and I infer, properly represented], will always generate a regress of frames that defer closure.” What a relief! I, we (poets), do not need to worry about representing consciousness completely! . Certainly then, I do not need to worry whether my consciousness will be communicated if no consciousness can be fully communicated. (I resist – with difficulty – digressing to a long, philosophical diatribe on the iffy-ness of any sort of “I” or unified consciousness, drawing support from everyone from Dennett, Hoffstrader, Fodor, Lacan, and Derrida.) Then why is there so much demand for me to say something personal on the page! The exclamation point in that sentence shouts in apostrophe to many of my readers and teachers, from parents to well-respected poets and philosophers. Do they make the same demand of authors of fiction? Does anyone put down Ulysses to demand of Joyce, Waves of Woolf or even Cavalier and Clay of Chabon, that he or she say more of herself? That is the “relief” the writer enjoys by using characters and plot: they speak for themselves (whichever selves, whosever they are, and whoever put them on the page). I can appreciate Browning’s work of this dramatic type in the same way as I appreciate good fiction. Like good fiction, this puts a big demand on the reader who must extrapolate from the specific characters represented, perhaps through a universal, toward a model that might apply to the reader’s own life. Rather than allowing the only particular to be the life or consciousness of a speaker identifiable with the poet, this fictional, dramatic type of poetry generates other particulars. These foil characters are somehow trustworthy in a way that a personal speaker might not be. Even when someone you don’t like as a person tells you a fairy tale or reads you a novel aloud, you can still enjoy the story. That is, if for some reason I start to feel like I dislike or feel distant from the speaker-character I associate with Sylvia Plath or Derek Walcott, it might be difficult to empathize with many poems. This one, albeit complex, “I” persists through many poems. In Walcott’s Midsummer, for example, there is no relief from the intense, 1:1 conversation with this insistent “I.” (And in the case of this book, I did at times want relief)
That said, of all Browning’s dramatic monologues – many of which could serve for study of his characters – I chose to write on “Andrea del Sarto” for personal reasons. I chose the poem not just for its tricks of formal method, but because of the topic and its relation to my personal life. This is a poem about a difficult relationship, about art – specifically visual art and living with a visual artist, topics close to home for me – and the relation between artists in general and their work, lives and partners in life. I – pause for ominous suspense after this pronoun – like this poem. I’ll probably write some poems modeled after it, or at least some poems around the same topics. The accumulation of selected topics and characters does allude to a curator, either Browning or myself. But the totality of that accumulation is precisely something I will never see in my own work, and something extraordinarily difficult to perceive even with all Browning’s work accompanied by years of criticism, sitting before me. But as a poet, writing via a foil character lets me, as I imagine it allowed Browning, to defer contemplation of that whole and concentrate on a few particulars.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Poems I love???

What sort of poems do I love? What a question. It’s a question Alan Shapiro asked me when we started out this term. That is, what were some of the first poems I loved? The poems I read before I even knew the names of the authors or what poetry was “for.” I remember going to my room – either because I was sent there or because I went to sulk there – when I was between maybe seven and thirteen and reading two or three poems form one book of poems over and over. These were my mantra poem: to read until I calmed down. Then I might browse through the book or get out other books and read them. But these two or three poems were the key to crawling into my safe place, mentally and physically. I recovered that book from my parents house this summer and found the poem that was most essential to my “practice” of retreating: “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. Magee won a small prize in poetry and published a few poems privately, but he was best known for this poem, “High Flight,” written while he was test-piloting a plane in World War II. He died shortly after Pearl Harbor. After Archibald Macleish selected the poem for a collection, it became well-known.

Of course, I knew none of this when I read the poem as a child. I read the poem because I had always wanted to be an astronaut: when I was five or six I told everyone I would be an astrophysicist; I dreamed of Space Camp; I read Stephen Hawking when I was eleven. Then I found out that astronauts must have perfect vision and be at least five feet four inches tall. After it was clear I would never attain even the requisite height on earth, I abandoned the career goal. I never bothered with physics in college and left off after a few advanced math classes. But the dream of me of being an astronaut – of seeing the whole thing – still haunted my vocational plans. Studying philosophy, writing poetry, seemed to be a way of short-circuiting the arduous scientific path toward that big picture knowledge.

Before I go any further, here's the poem:

I did not set out to investigate this poem because it acted via a particular pre-determined craft element. READ MORE... Rather, I want to study this poem to see which craft elements play a role in effecting the sort of poem I found (or find?) secretly and firmly to be paradigmatic of “Poem.” To that end, I will proceed from the outside in, scanning the poem from its most broad structures and conceits to find this hidden craft element. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to cut to the chase)

Magee’s poem is a fourteen-line, near-Shakespearean sonnet with an ABAB rhyme scheme, until the last five lines which proceed FEGFG. The rhymes are straight, perfect rhymes of one-syllable words. Alliteration and consonance of “s” sounds string together throughout the poem: for example, “slipped,” “surly,” “skies, “laughter-silver wings,” “Sunward,” all the way through to “silent… sanctity of space.” Coinciding with the dramatic action of the poem, “s” sounds build momentum as the pilot lifts off from earth and speeds into flight. And yet there is relief from this alliteration in the penultimate couplet, “Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.” At the moment in the poem, Magee's speaker has climbed “up, up the long delirious blue” ; acceleration has ceased: reader and speaker pause, in orbit, in empty, quiet space.

The lines are steady iambic pentameter, with a few exceptions in the first foot: line three varies the initial iamb with a trochee, “Sunward”; line five has a spoken stress on the initial “You” of “You have not dreamed of…”; similarly, line six, emphasize “High”; and line nine begins with a spondee, “Up, up.” These initial variations relax the sonnet into a slightly more colloquial tone. Both the topic and the discourse are so elevated that these gentle shifts in emphasize make the speaker and the content more accessible.

To address this issue of content, I want to consider first the plot or dramatic action of the poem and then the rhetorical tropes employed there in. The poem has a fairly simple plot: the speaker has “slipped the surly bonds” of gravity and headed up into the sky, past the clouds, where he has done many things “you have not dreamed of.” Up in the sky, he hovered, in some sort of “craft”-- I'll resist the temptation to dwell on poetic craft -- and then, he managed, up there in space to touch “the face of God.” Magee’s language fluctuates between semi-metaphors and periphrasis. For example, rather than directly saying that he has “escaped gravity” he says, periphrastically, that he has “slipped the surly bonds of earth.” In the atmosphere, he “joined the tumbling mirth” of clouds: that is, the clouds were, metaphorically, dancing around. He also chased the wind which was, metaphorically, “shouting … along.”

The most obvious criticism that I can imagine one might level at Magee’s poem is that it is abstract and sentimental. Let me take each of those accusations in turn. Magee’s poem is “abstract” in that it digresses through the periphrases mentioned above, and it includes adjectives whose content is difficult to pin down: for example, in the phrases “surly bonds,” “eager craft” and “delirious burning blue” and “easy grace.” As a reader, I know vaguely what he means to suggests, but my imagination depends on previous association of these words with elevated topics rather than an encounter with a new, specific image. Magee’s poem could be seen as “sentimental” in that he discusses perhaps clichéd topics – flying away from earth, dancing with the stars, and talking to God – and he reacts, as would be expected, with awe and joy.

But I love this poem! How can it be abstract and sentimental? (Or worse, if it is abstract and sentimental, why do I love it?) The success of Magee’s poem depends not on innovation in the sonnet form – as I hope I've shown, the rhymes, meter, and argument structure are standard – and not on the novel or bizarre language – again, we’ve seen that he uses clichéd adjectival phrases – but on its rhetorical tools and effect. Although I mentioned some instance of metaphor, as a whole, the poem performs as a metonymy. It is not the series of clichéd metaphors – joyful clouds and halls of air – that affect me as a reader. Rather, I am persuaded into the imaginary because the poem was written by a person literally up in the sky. (Magee wrote the poem at 30,000 feet, quite a height in the early twentieth century.) In my book, the poem appears above a photo of a Edward White, the first American to “float in space” and the facing page contains a picture of “Africa and Other Areas of the Earth, Seen from Apollo 17 Spacecraft.” (The poem was later quoted by Ronald Regan during the Challenger disaster)

Magee's poem results not from idle speculation, but observation. He does not aruge that some abstraction – say, the life of the mind— is, in simile, like floating in space or that it is, metaphorically, an adventure into the stratosphere. Magee is not wandering in the forest like Wordsworth, mulling over existence (personal and general) and history and offering comparisons or approximations. While Magee’s language might veer toward the abstract or sentimental, he conveys a quite concrete and specific experience to the reader. Magee says, “I am floating in space. I really am. That’s it.” And it just so happens that the next association over on the horizontal access of metonymic similarity, a la Jacoboson is “touching the face of God.” These two events are found together like shoes and slippers, a bed and a pillow, or a mother and love. It’s hard to disassociate a mother from love (whether the effect is to call up a lack of love, the pain of love, the loss of love, or an excess of love). Likewise, floating in orbit and watching the whole of the planet is, perhaps for our species, not dissociable from the notion of God (leaving that massive noun's definition in a secular suspense).

This poem appears in a collection titled, Imaginary Gardens, taken from a phrase in a Marianne Moor poem: “… nor till the poets among us can be / ‘literalists of / the imagination’… and can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (This poem is included in the collection) Moore means that the poet ought to create so accurately and precisely imaginary places that real and familiar things just appear in them. And the real work of the poet, the real poetry is with the real things, not in the “fiddle,” as she puts it, that generates them. Magee might fiddle around with language a bit, but he does get you to the real. He doesn’t make an imaginary garden; he only tells you where he’s sitting and that’s quite interesting enough.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Civilizations, Images, and the Subjunctive

Today I'm reading Elizabeth Arnold's second book, Civilization. That's quite a hefty title to take on, but the book manages that sweep (most of the time). A set a poems about her father interspersed through the first half anchor the book. At first, every other poem treats some broader, less personal subject. By the end of the book which is divided into sections, we've left the intimate scenes of the father in a nursing home, for a wider lens that takes in everything from gravity, Europe in the Middle Ages, to the soul and Catal Hyuk. By the way, this is a really *beautiful* book, not just in content but as an object. It's put out by Flood Editions, and it has a black paper page in the front and back that ominously encase the poems.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been trying to figure out exactly what's going on in an "imagist poem" and whether or not people are or can be writing anything like that today. Arnold's book contains a few petite poems that cannot help but call to mind Pound's "At a station at the metro" or other classic imagist poems (which were originally influenced by Japanese haiku and French symbolism). READ MORE... Here's one example from the book:

" Solstice

We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun! "


Because I've been taking a French class, I've been thinking a lot about the subjunctive. The French have to be more careful to differentiate between an opinion, a suggestion, a hypothesis, and a statement of fact. Of course, we use the subjunctive in English as well, but we use it less frequently and less precisely. You can make a suggestion that someone do something, and the tense doesn't necessarily differentiate it from the fact that the person *is* doing that thing. But more interestingly, we don't differentiate our opinions of events from statements of fact about those events.

It seems that a true Imagist poem could not have any subjunctive clauses. That is, the Imagist intends only to present what is... not to comment on it, or to suggests that the image might be otherwise than it is. Arnold's poem seems to negotiate just this subtlety, making subjunctive comments on images.

Of course, "Solstice" wouldn't literally require the subjunctive, even in translation. But it seems that the sense of the second sentences, "[I find it so pathetic / amazing / touching] that they tried to persuade the sun to come back." She hasn't just given us the Romans lighting fires, she's said what she thinks about this fact... and in French, that would entail the subjunctive. But her commentary takes us away from the image and into the mind of the poem's speaker who witnesses it. I wonder to myself, not just about the oddity of the persuasion of the sun, but about who "We" are that they were so erudite that they would sit around and chat about Roman solstice rituals. In another poem, "Daddy," she offers an image of her father diving, head first, hands behind him, and suggests "His whole being like that." This little phrase in a short, three line poem, again takes us from the image to a comment on the image. Moreover, in the context of the book, we cannot help but attend to the impact of this father's actions on the speakers of the poems... who are quite hard to disassociate from the author, Arnold.

So, though her petite poems give all the appearance of imagism, I would say they differ quite significantly, though in more or less obvious ways. (an image does not an imagist poem make) "Solstice" is much more subtle in its commentary than "Daddy" and others... and I prefer "Solstice" precisely because of the anonymity of the speaker. Many, many people might wonder about the persuasion of the sun; only Arnold wonders about that father. The pleasure of the imagist poems is that, as far as it is possible, it does let the speaker disappear. We can zoom out, we can enjoy that contemplating-the-universe feeling you have when watching the Discover Channel, Planet Earth, or the Life of Mammals. Or even the more human -- yet impersonal -- voyeurism of Benjamin's flanneur.

Merleau-Ponty speaks often -- and is equally often criticized for these comments about -- the "anonymous body." What he means by this is still unclear to me, but it's something like whatever we share that permits empathy, that permits collective behavior. It's whatever makes you human and not just you. The trouble (and the source of his well-deserved criticism) is that there might not be such a body, that not all bodies are the same, etc. And yet... I am persuaded by the potential of this notion. But we would have to let it mean not some literal physical construction, but a shared sensibility. In that case.. The best poetry (or, let's be clear: the poetry *I* enjoy) appeals to the anonymous body ... perhaps requires the anonymous body in order to be understood ... perhaps let's the anonymous body speak.

Would that make it the poetry of the indicative, not the subjunctive?